The psychodynamic determinants of Moses and Monotheism

Personal influences on professional work: an empirical case study of B.F. Skinner

This study addresses the hypothesis that individuals have characteristic ways of looking at the world that are revealed not only in their life story but also in their professional work. It seeks to provide the first empirical test of this hypothesis using systematic methods for data selection, interpretation, and matching, as applied to the case of B. F. Skinner. Using the salience identifier "primacy" (Alexander, 1990), Skinner's first research design and the first paragraph of his autobiography were selected for analysis. Adopting a personological approach to interpretation, "scripts" (Tomkins, 1987) were derived from these materials by blind and independent coders. A matching task (Allport, 1961) then indicated that the scripts derived from Skinner's work and life were substantially similar and significantly more similar than random pairs of scripts . A search through other autobiographical and professional writings by Skinner revealed that the elements of the discovered script appear recurrently in his imagery.

Freud and the figure of Moses: the Moses of Freud

Moses was a lifelong preoccupation of Freud, representing a double and idealized self and object. Freud identified with different aspects of Moses during different periods of development, from concrete hero to abstract ideal. He turned to Moses in the concluding phase of his relationship with Fliess and his self-analysis, and then at other times of crisis. The Moses recreated by Freud is important to the evolution of the concepts of the superego, and his Moses studies simultaneously illuminate the developmental significance of internalization, identification, and abstract symbolic thought. Latently autobiographical, the Moses motif is related to the analysis of unconscious conflict and trauma and to issues of Jewish identity and analytic ideals.